Sean Lovelace is running right now, far. Other times he teaches at Ball State University. HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS is his flash fiction collection by Rose Metal Press. His works have appeared in Crazyhorse, Diagram, Sonora Review, Willow Springs, and so on.
Dee Dee Ramone was the first man with a woman’s name to be like, “Fuck your necktie and your mom’s gurney.” Dee Dee Ramone had the impact of keeping hand grenades in your car’s cup holders. The man was a retaining wall and a fuck-load cooler than we. He was so beautiful he had to kill that beauty, as we know the world must work. Or not work.
“I have no doubts in my mind where my loyalties are. They’re with myself. I’m all I’ve got.”
“I like dragons so much that I tried to look for one outside the window of the plane that I’m in now.”
“My only degree is in streetology.”
“Today I was wondering what God was going to do with me now.”
“I’m not a punk, skin, Nazi, or snob. I’m defiant. I’m angry. You made me that way. So fuck you all.”
“Dragons…Imagine one flying over one of the meadows, high above New York City’s Central Park, one crowded Sunday afternoon.”
“We all paid a price for it. It was a lot.”
“I can’t rap too well.”
“I would like to thank myself, and congratulate myself, and if I could, I would pat myself on the back.”
“I spotted a dragon immediately.”
we shot craps in the exercise yard while the
dummies played ball with a torn-up shirt
wound into a ball
once or twice a day we had to break it up
under a tommy gun from the tower—
some blank-faced screw pointing it at
us, but,
You do send your Very Best work Every time when submitting to a literary magazine, right?
Ah, the university novel. You know them, lined on the shelf in luxurious elbows: Lucky Jim, Straight Man, Death in a Tenured Position, Wonder Boys, I Am Charlotte Simmons, The Gaudy Night, etc. (I am sure you can name many others–go right ahead.)
We get the usual ideas of the Ivy Tower, layer after constructed layer, grazing grey skies of tile, the empty smiles (can I get a motion? I second that motion!), dusty classroom to cramped office to bewildering department meeting of the bewildered, a city made of suffering elephants, a Matryoshka doll (stop that metaphor!) of sad absurdity. (Here I am addressing English Departments, as do most of these novels. Makes sense, I suppose: Write what you know, and for many writers, the U is nursemaid, benefactor, sad (or happy?) reprieve.
Sad X 2 above, as device, for emphasis. Sad is the one cloistered within, wrapped in gauze and weak coffee, kept from the wobbles and needles and very real pains of the Real World, to fade, fade away…into self-laugh, self-hate, into nothingness.
But Stoner is not like these other novels (at least not the ones I have read).
I would rather teach one T.C. Boyle story 50 times (i.e. this one) than read another two.
The writer sitting in the department meeting is still a writer.
The pursuit of publication is a cowardly action.
A writer who has never been humiliated is a monster.
It is possible for the diary of a revolutionary to have a greater impact on society than the revolution itself.
Entertainment has already replaced art under the name of art; and soon information will replace entertainment under the name of entertainment.
The writer cannot afford to be isolated and trampled.
Accepted writers love to discuss rejection.
Nicknames are for athletes and the occasional movie star. I would argue the finest as “The Hammer,” aka Charlie Sheen, only because it was bestowed by teenage Las Vegas call girls. In athletics, I’ll go Owen “What the Heck” Beck (a not so zealous Jamaican boxer), Nicolai “Old One Leg” Andrianov (Russian gymnast), and “He Hate Me,” startling, odd, possibly existential, always fucking awesome, and worn proudly by XFL running back, Rod Smart.
And for writers? (We are not talking pseudonyms, another thing entirely.)
Wow. In these days of all Nicey-Nice, I thought the truly scathing book review went the way of disco or actually meeting someone before you made them your “Friend.” I was wrong. Picked up a New Yorker (OK, it’s a month old, which is like a decade in Internet years, but bear with me) all crumpled/curled on my bedside table in Relaxed Rat position, and inside James Wood takes Paul Auster to the blender.
If you need a primer on evisceration via book review, here you go: